I suppose when he was at his mums and tots group as well, he didn’t particularly used to join in with things as such but he was always happy to be in the middle of a group, whereas Joseph used to go and sort find things to do on his own and then like I say, they used to sort of, if there was something on the telly, Joseph used to stand in front of the telly and he would always jump and flap up and down and Joseph’s flap has always been a hands out like this, whereas Adam's has always been a totally different thing, but of course we always thought that Adam was just copying Joseph and it always seemed to be if Joseph did it then Adam did it as well, but now we know that Adam was doing it in his own right, but of course we just thought that he was copying.

And then I suppose when it got to about, it must have been about eighteen months old and I noticed that Adam’s little friend Eddie the Shredder had started talking and things and I thought Adam’s not... But he was still sort of babbling away and sort of making funny little noises.  And then I think really the crux of it for me was when he suddenly picked the pen up and you know there was a pen on the table in the living room and he picked it up and he did this and watched it go past his eye. Now Joseph used to do that a lot, but he hadn’t done it since Adam was about six months old.

 

And I said to my husband, I said, “I am sure Adam is like autistic as well”.  And he said, “No he is not. He is just copying Joseph.” I said, “He is, he is. He has just done this thing that Joseph hasn’t done for ages”. And he was absolutely convinced that Adam must have remembered some distant memory. But I said, “No, he has got to be”. And I actually phoned my paediatrician directly. I didn’t sort of go through the doctor, the GP or the health visitor because I thought well, if he is, I would rather get a diagnosis quite quickly and he was brilliant. He arranged really quickly for us, within a couple of weeks actually to go and see him and sort of almost instantly he said, “Yes, he is on the autistic spectrum as well” which was an absolutely massive blow, because I think with Joseph we had always suspected that there was something different about him, but with Adam it was just, “Oh god, why us, why have we got two like it?” and I think for me the first six months after the diagnosis were really, really hard because you are coming to the terms with the fact as well, that I have only ever had two children and they are both autistic.